Meet Edward Nowakoski. Once a practicing attorney and trustee, he is now disbarred, on criminal probation, and has paid more than $542,000 in restitution. The final cherry on top? An additional $399,681 civil penalty from the probate court.

That final penalty is the focus of the California Court of Appeal’s partially published opinion in Moramarco…

Even a court order approving an accounting may not protect a California fiduciary if the accounting is inaccurate. That’s the upshot of Hudson v. Foster (2021) 68 Cal.App.5th 640, a recent California Court of Appeal decision involving a conservatorship.

The conservatee in this case consented to the conservator’s account and four years passed before…